Just Down-Home Folks
The Newton Boys
Willis Newton characterized the Newton boys’ career a trifle more sanctimoniously than he should have when he said, “Bonnie and Clyde was just silly kids . . . we wasn’t at all like them . . . all we wanted was the money, just like . . . other businessmen.”
Well, not quite like other businessmen, for the Newton boys used guns and nitroglycerin as their primary tools instead of law books or scalpels or adding machines. But at least they generally behaved fairly reasonably, if you didn’t mind getting robbed all that much. They were certainly not psychopathic scum like Larry DeVol or his ilk.
And indeed, the Newtons became pretty good at their “business,” leading Willis Newton to brag a little later on: “In my time I robbed over eighty banks and six trains. . . . I don’t want to say how much money it all added up to, but it was more than Jesse James, the Dalton boys, and Bonnie and Clyde got, all put together.”
There were four Newton brothers, which most bankers thought was about four too many. But in fact, if you had to be held up by somebody, the Newton brothers would probably be your first choice. They were even pleasant, often passing the time of day with their victims . . . while they stole their worldly goods.
They were named Willis, Joe, Jess, and Dock. They were Texas boys, out of Uvalde, part of a family of eleven kids. Still in their teens, Dock and Willis got two years for stealing cotton in 1910. Dock, ever the man of action of the boys, spent his time up the river thinking up various ways to escape—none of them bore fruit—until at last the boys’ long-suffering mother pleaded with the governor to at least let the more peaceful Willis out early, so that he could help with the miserable task of picking cotton on the old home place.
By the end of 1914, Willis decided he wasn’t cut out for the peaceful bucolic life, and he went off with a friend to hold up a train and rob its passengers of their worldly goods, almost five Gs’ worth. He got away with that one, but he also went on dabbling in penny-ante crime and got caught peddling, of all things, a pile of pilfered clothing. That got him two more years in jail.
But now Willis showed a flash of real genius: He wrote the judge who sentenced him and the lawman who nabbed him and asked each of them to sign a petition for his parole. They wrote in reply, and their response was no surprise: not no, but hell no. But their mercy was not what Willis was looking for: All he really wanted was their signatures, and once he had those, he forged them onto his own petition. It worked.
Back to the big time. From here on, no more lifting long johns. From here on it would be banks; Willis had discovered the eternal truth that Willie Sutton put so well: “That’s where the money is.” He is said to have rationalized his decision in the time-tested way: “Some of them banks out in West Texas didn’t care about hurtin’ us poor farmers, so why would I care about hurtin’ them?”
This was long before the advent of the FDIC, so those same poor farmers were unprotected if the bank went belly up unless it carried private insurance. Maybe Willis didn’t know that, but if he did think of it, his expressed pious sympathy for his fellow farmers didn’t get between him and their money.
Willis figured he would need help robbing banks, and brothers Dock—just escaped from jail—young Joe, and Jess were willing. Just about anything beat picking cotton in the blazing sun, and the lure of lots of money was a potent siren to poor farm boys and ex-jailbirds.
The Newtons started off with nighttime raids, hitting country banks especially during autumn harvest time, when farmers deposited their earnings. The boys became artists with nitroglycerin; as Willis reasonably commented, “That’s what it’s made for, is to blow banks.” So for a while the gang concentrated on smaller targets, using nitro—“grease” to the outlaw fraternity—and they became experts on which kind of safe the stuff worked on the best.
The safe door had to have right-angle doors; that way, the nitro lodged nicely in the cracks between the doors and the safe itself. Round doors were to be avoided: The nitro ran out before you could fire it, or if it did go off, there wasn’t enough left to bust the door.
They traveled around, spreading their handiwork on square doors from Texas to Canada and points in between. It worked, and the poor country boys had money to spend, until at last they got greedy and decided to go for a daylight robbery. Willis seems to have been the mastermind of this one, flying in the face of his own maxim: It was better to say “there he goes,” rather than “here he lies.”
He should have listened to himself.
The boys picked a bank in New Braunfels, Texas, in 1923, and it turned out to be a bonanza: just over one hundred thousand dollars. That sure beat stealing other people’s pants and even nighttime blasts of unstable grease.
There were risks, of course. Among other things, the Texas Bankers Association posted an announcement in all of its banks. Its intent was crystal clear: “Reward. Five thousand dollars for dead bank robbers. Not one cent for live ones.”
If that terse announcement seemed a little short on notions of due process of law, in practice it made eminent good sense. Like lynching, it eliminated the chance of such inconveniences as hung juries, appeals, mistrials, and such.
Then there was the Toronto robbery in 1923, an unusual raid because the gang attacked a currency clearinghouse rather than a bank. In those days the banks—at least the major ones—had currency of their own. They took in money during the day, and at night it was loaded into trucks and taken to the clearinghouse to be sorted out. Then next business morning, each bank got its own currency back. Couriers carried big bags of money out of each bank each night and carried bags back to the banks the next morning.
The sight of all those bags of money made the gang’s mouths water. They did their usual careful reconnaissance, but they didn’t account for the confusion of crowded streets and courageous couriers who wouldn’t give up the sacks they carried. Willis wounded a bank guard who intervened to try to help the couriers and was shooting at the robbers from the window of his automobile.
Couriers scattered in all directions. The outlaws got two sacks, but then they had to run for their lives. People in the surrounding buildings were throwing chairs and anything else they could lift down at the robbers, and the police were closing in; the gang had to do some fancy driving through traffic to get clear. The car was quickly hidden in a garage, and Willis and Dock took themselves out of the line of fire by going to a movie.
Willis said later that he was concerned for anybody that might get in the gang’s way. “I always told the boys, ‘If you have to shoot don’t shoot to kill.’” Which sounded good after the fact but apparently didn’t consider the difficulty involved in just nicking somebody in the midst of a multigun melee. He also said the gang “loaded our guns with birdshot a lot of times just so we wouldn’t kill anybody.”
The tremendous New Braunfels and Toronto successes whetted the gang’s collective appetite for still bigger and better things. Especially Willis’s ambition now knew no bounds, and that led him to rob a train in the summer of 1924 on a tip that it was loaded with money and diamonds. Young Joe had his doubts about this undertaking, but Willis was the boss, and he made the call to take down the train at a town called Roundout, some thirty miles from Chicago.
It turned out to be the biggest train holdup in American history, eclipsing all the raids more famous outlaws had made before. The gang apparently did have inside information, supposedly from somebody in the postal service and from a “high-placed” Chicago politician. The target was a Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul mail train, and they struck it only twenty-five miles or so from Chicago. This time Willis took along some extra help, a confederate named Brent Glasscock, who had worked with the Newtons before.
The gang had watched carefully as mail trucks rolled one after another into the train depot. It was tempting to rob one or more trucks as they arrived, but the police station was only a couple of blocks away; if they robbed the trucks “right here on the street, we was liable to have to shoot somebody.” So the plan shifted gears: Let all that money get out of town, together in one place, and take it there. While they were waiting and planning, they struck a payroll out in Cicero for a cool thirty-five thousand dollars.
The train remained the big goal, however, the golden fleece, the bonanza. The plan to take it was carefully worked out since the target was the sacks of registered mail. There was the question of whether to use gas on the mail clerks or go in without it, how to get away with multiple heavy mailbags, and planning for the all-important getaway. Their careful preparation included stealing a couple of cars—both Cadillacs—fueling them, and then stashing them in rented garages until the gang was ready to move.
Their careful preparation paid off to a point; two of the gang got on the train, thoughtfully wearing overalls and caps, booted several hobos off the train, moved in on the engineer and fireman and ordered them to stop the train. And they got it stopped, although the engineer, understandably frightened, overshot the gang’s appointed stopping place at Roundout by a whole train length.
The mail clerks were forced to open the car door with a threat of poison gas—in fact a bottle of formaldehyde—and came out, a total according to the outlaws of “seventeen,” leaving their revolvers in the car, and were set to work loading the stolen mailbags in the bandits’ Cadillacs . . . and that was when the whole operation came unstuck.
For Glasscock, for reasons not apparent then or later, started shooting. It wasn’t a clerk he hit, although that would have been bad enough, it was Dock Newton, hit several times, and “bleeding like a stuck hog.”
The gang managed to get clear of the holdup site and discovered they had hit the proverbial jackpot, some three million dollars in cash and bonds, a haul that could have, in Willis’s words, financed a trip to Mexico “where we could buy ourselves some ranch land and live like kings.” But there was Dock, in bad shape from Glasscock’s panicked shooting, and he had to be helped first. A doctor’s visit was arranged, but somebody had seen the rest of the gang carry a man in a chair into the apartment where they hid out. And so the boys passed into captivity.
The later years were kind to the brothers. On sentencing they managed a sweetheart deal, negotiating remarkably light sentences in return for turning over most of the loot. Joe got only a year in Leavenworth, and the other brothers were free men by 1929.
The gang was never reformed. Jess worked on ranches in Texas until cancer got him in 1960. Joe returned to Texas, where he operated a couple of businesses and farmed with his father for a while. Dock got involved in still another burglary—a store, this time. He spent eight months in the prison hospital for what Willis wrote later was a frame-up. He passed away in 1974, also of cancer.
Willis and Joe lived on, enjoying their mutual hobby of beekeeping. Willis died in 1979, and Joe lasted a decade longer. Willis, the leader of the pack, retained his professional pride, looking down on people in the robbery business he considered his inferiors. Bonnie and Clyde, for instance, “never robbed a bank in their life, they just robbed filling stations and stores.” The brothers’ outlaw successes put them, in Willis’s eyes, far above all the other hoodlums who would have loved to rob other people but “just didn’t have the guts . . . they wouldn’t have known how to do it. They couldn’t rob a kitchen safe.”